bang bang bang
by st.concertina
Summary: "Of course I'd find you," He says, watching her closely with those dark gunmetal eyes of his. "You did kill me, after all." — It starts again in a teahouse, in the heart of a cold war. The dead don't stay dead. Sasori would know her face anywhere.
1. Chapter 1

**entitled:** bang bang bang  
**fandom:** naruto, sasosaku  
**setting:** current shinobi war does not continue on the battlefield, but stretched years off it. a cold war continues, the akatsuki have been resurrected to carry on their side of things. undermining the elemental nations, running an intricate web of informants and hunting down shinobi in a bleak age where no one trusts no one.  
**warnings:** sex, and violence.  
**disclaimer:** i own nothing that isn't already mine  
**notes:** cannon, but divergent in terms of recent events.  
**summary: **"Of course I'd find you," He says, watching her closely with those dark gunmetal eyes of his. "You did kill me, after all." — It starts again in a tea house, in the heart of a cold war. The dead don't stay dead. Sasori would know her face anywhere.

* * *

Sasori painted, sleeve held back at the wrist and brush sweeping across paper – he painted screens for sliding doors of feudal houses, a background of cranes, the dip of a birds-wing as they took flight across a gold tint of lake, women in colorful yukata, round white faces hidden behind fans. Very modern, very beautiful, stunning enough to appear in the tea rooms of nobles.

From the age of eight, everyone was already asking for commissions from the young Akasuna no Sasori. Talked of the dark of his eyes and the smooth of his face, no expressions to betray anything, a _genius._

The slides were taken down to be changed around every spring – faded after months of direct silent, filtered into pale shadows of what their vibrant designs once were. They never lasted, and he was serving a much too fashionable society, they appreciated his work as pretty things but never _appreciated_ them. What made it different from any other thing money could buy? What made his paintings anything more than seasonal _ornaments_ when treated in such a manner?

It ate at him. This obtuse affluence, this lack of worth, this inability to leave an impression, something to outlast the ages…

Sasori was never truly an artist then.

* * *

"You certainly have an odd hobby."

The man had a deep low voice, and his ringed eyes stared straight back at his from the dark of his hat. It was a large wide brimmed hat, a traveller's fancy, with bells trailing at the edges and shadows deep enough to keep his face from Sasori. "Akasuna no Sasori, is it?"

The red head eased himself up from hovering over his kill, knees unbending and looking the least bit impressed or concerned at having been caught, quite literally, red handed. And maybe Pein had seen something formidable about the distinctly casual lack of regard in his eyes, a boredness that he was both disgusted and yet approving of because Sasori doubts now if anything less than his apathy over murder would have ever enrolled him into the organization.

"You're in my house." Sasori said, his paint brush soaked through, a single droplet of blood edged down, slanted across it before falling to the tatami mat. He made no move to wipe the spray of blood across his jaw from where the woman had struggled and clutched at him for purchase as he killed her. He had been uncharacteristically messy this time, picking out a courtesan with a pretty voice instead of someone less known.

"Breaking and entering, versus Murder? Compromising situation you have here." Said the stranger leaning against the chouji, the night behind him was a deep midnight blue and though the moon was a sick luminescent yellow it didn't light a single feature on him. Not even the lamps flickering on the walls could discern him. Sasori was intrigued. "I expected a painter with strange tastes, but this is stranger. More explicit."

Sasori didn't even raise a brow, after a while you become desensitized to these things. "It's a bit late. If you require a commission call on me in the morning like everyone else."

"I don't want a commission." An odd feeling in the air, like he was smiling, how peculiar. "Tell me, though, have you heard of the Akatsuki?"

He had been seventeen then, bringing back women, men and children back to his home. Cutting them into pieces, bleeding them out – other things, experimenting. Curious things. Nothing frightened him. "No."

"You keep such a straight face," He had murmured. "You never batted an eyelash from the first day I'd been following you, though something tells me you knew."

Sasori turned his eyes at him as if his talk made him grow bored. Then folded his arms, white cuffs of his shirt spotted crimson, did not act perturbed by the blood pooling steadily from the woman's throat, the blood that touched the edges of his bare feet. Dressed in the bare cotton yukata meant for sleep as he was, killing was casual for him, relaxed. He wished the woman had not flailed so and made him slash her neck crooked, he'd wanted a cleaner cut that wouldn't mar against her skin.

"You want something." He drawled, and the paintbrush danced between his fingers and knuckles. His eyes were a dim almost supernatural glow, nothing like the stranger's.

"Your grandmother, how is she?"

Sasori blinked. And when he replied, his schooled suspicion spoke with the slightest cool of an edge. "In Suna, somewhere."

"Ah, well. She's an embalmer, with a strange liking for kabuki theatre." He mused, a dark hand reached to rub his equally hidden chin in thought. "You're much like her. I imagine you learnt the tools required of your hobby from her?"

Sasori felt sneering would be appropriate at this moment, but he only managed an indifferent snort, too above even that. Yes, learning the arts of embalming helped preserve his pretties, his puppets, his beautiful dolls – but, this was no hobby, this was _art._

"Come with us and you need not hide anymore."

"Please," He narrowed his eyes a fraction. "What could you offer me?"

"Your coming and goings are beginning to make others suspicious, you and I both know that it won't be long before some errant busy body decided to investigate."

"Then I'll kill them." He'd said, simply.

"Yes, you will. But once faced with a swarm of them, you'll have to run for the waters, hide under. You won't have a problem – but will you be able to carry your collection with you, on the run?

Indeed, that was a problem. He could seal away his pretties into scrolls, but what about the others in the basement, still being preserved – he was not done with them yet, moving them when the creation where still incomplete would be a bother. The paint brush flipped and was caught once more in his palm, an odd habit of his, when he thought. His eyes never left the stranger and his shadows.

"You want me to become a mercenary."

"I have the funds and the means to secure your…art." He countered lowly. "You will have the bodies you want, a secret location where you need not be found by others – store your things. Travel around. What more could you want?"

"How much would you pay me?"

"Whatever you want, within reason, enough to last you more than any commission could."

"You're a strange man, propositioning me. Any person could have a twisted enough mind to pursue something as taboo as what I practice," he lowered himself once more to the ground on crossed legs, dipped a finger across the limp lower jaw of the courtesan, her eyes with their burst capillaries frozen in horror even in death. "Why me? You don't know if I'm skilled in a fight, only that I murder – why not recruit your regular cutpurse?"

"I've been watching you."

"Of course."

"Then you know that I've seen enough to know that you're very skilled with the knife"

"You make it hard for me to consider letting you leave."

"I'll give you a month to decide." said Pein, because Sasori had lied when he said he didn't know anything. "If you make your choice before that, go to Ame. Not even you could touch me."

"If you make yourself a bother, I won't hesitate."

"I like you, Akasuna no Sasori." He mused, wry and his eyes fell on the pretty courtesan with her dead ghastly eyes and her pale bled out skin and the long spindly cast of her arms. Like a broken heron, crushed between stalks of bamboo as the flood falls away. "Don't fail me."

And then he vanished.

Sasori picked up the courtesan's wrist, smoothed his hands over the back of her lily white hand and frowned in distaste. The offer was interesting, Sasori was curious and painting commissions wasn't cutting it anymore. "You ruined your pretty eyes," he murmured to the broken girl. "If you had not struggled I would not have held on so tightly and made the cut neater, I suppose we'll replace them with glass marble, ivory, I think, perhaps

Perhaps we'll see"

He was fifteen.

* * *

Two days later, Akasuna no Sasori returned to Sunagakare. Three days after that the Kazekage disappeared, as did thirteen courtesans – People said he had been kidnapped, others said he had gone off with the women to make his own home of whores among the mountains, it made a good story, mysterious alluring and downright laughable. The room he'd last been seen in had the monsoon silk veils askew in the cold breeze smoothing over the scorching sands of midnight, the musk of jasmine incense still floating up in the corner of the room, that was what he left that world with.

There was no sign of a struggle and stories were always such grand things, the rumours about Akasuna no Sasori were all more sensational than the last, all more daring, all more and more risque. Spilled about like wine at a wedding.

Akasuna no Sasori left Suna, the same night the graves of his parents were found overturned to be found empty, earth fresh and unmarred by any such decay suggesting the existence of previous corpses. There had never been any bodies in the first place. Chiyo had never left them for him to play with, she'd known, even then.

And in Ame, he met God.

* * *

He was young when his parents left the known world, and his grandmother lied to him. Pretty little worn out lies – They are out for the kage, they will return, it's been a hard mission. Chiyo the embalmer was a high standing individual.

And then the bodies came back and the lies were useless pretty things, like shingles and wind chimes hanging from the grain of the doorframe. There was a funeral, the bodies were not undamaged.

And Sasori built them up better than the ruin of their corpses, he carved fine cedar, and deep mahogany. He kept them with eyes closed like sleeping dolls. He brought them out and brought out his hammers and his wood chips and his nails and he fixed them. He _fixed_ them.

So when he brought his chakra threaded fingers together, it drew him into an embrace of cool of polished wood and the heaviness of grain, one twitch and it could fall apart.

He didn't fix them well enough. He didn't feel anything, they weren't there. Not all the craftsmanship in the world, not even the imbibing funeral arts of his grandmother could fix them. This blank little boy with his cold little toys that were, in the end, _just toys._

Sasori was never an artist until he was fourteen years of age, he had already made jounin and on an assassination foray to the dusky fogs of Mizu, to the Mist where only the glow of sick barlights shone in the dark. Cloudy mud slipped under his feet and he made no sound in the pools of rain, breathing heavy gusts of cold behind his ANBU mask. He'd been done with the kill, it had been easy, a service the Mizukage was grateful for, that almost made them war heroes…Sasori could not care less.

A lady of the night sought him on the street corner, even the moisture couldn't cloud out the stench of smoke and cheap perfume. She'd propositioned him, he declined. She was persistent and he was about to give her a cutting put down, perhaps fling her away – he was until he realized that beneath the crust of smog and the make up, she had very brown eyes and a pale tapering throat. He was fascinated.

When he followed her into her dusty flat, a small rickshaw thing with the drunken murmurs of the next door neighbor traveling through the slip thin walls she began to undress. She brought him close to her body like one would an infant, even if he was taller than her, she cooed. Her slender arms closed around him in an embrace. Sasori had eased himself, attempted to relax, attempted to be won over – but could not. She did not smell of cardamom like his mother had, and she did not have the wood shavings stuck in her lank black hair like his father had, his father would bat them from his forehead with the back of his hand, chips stuck in his wild red hair. They had been beautiful, and even as dolls they weren't enough – they did not stay behind, they were not immortal, they did not outlast the ages, only in his mind. And that was what made them art. Memory.

When he took her, it was simply copulation, mechanics. It was too simple, it wasn't poignant, and she screamed too loudly, was too loud, tried too hard to be vocal.

And right then he wanted to hear her screams for real, in honesty.

So with her sheets tangled around her waist, and her belly pressed against the too thin mattress, the tattered bed sheet pattern – the too heavy perfume – Sasori picked up his scalpel and then she _really_ screamed. Screamed till the blood welled up from her spine, screamed till her throat went raw and torn, screamed and screamed and _screamed._

He carved her to perfection, no anesthetics, let her live through the pain.

Art was about the everlasting, the sort that created a forever impression, the sort that left you with its impact for the rest of your life, and the life after that and haunted you in the night, ripped through your dreams and stalked down your daylight.

Art lay in the _scars._

And blade deep across the thin of her skin, he carved art, carved her scars – a butterfly of intricacies, a Lilly pad and all the winding strokes that none of his screens could ever encompass, she was a dirty ugly scrap of a girl when he met her and even as she sniveled into the mattress when she could scream no longer and passed out from the first stages of blood loss with the blade deep to the hilt on her shoulder, carving round bone Sasori felt none of her distress, saw no wrong, she was a filthy scrap of girl and he was making her beautiful. She would have scars that all her men would see, scars with their own stories, scars that would never leave her alone.

Burned into her for all eternity.

Art lay in the scars.

And he did not kill her, when he was done he slipped his hands into his pockets and smeared his fingertips across his cheeks, blood like war paint. At the bottom of the stairs, a blind man grinned. "You drove her hard, never heard a whore scream anything close to as loud, even when they were really trying." His teeth crusted in tobacco, a glint of gold and foul breath that not even the rain could mist away. "She'll miss you, she will."

"I've left her something to remember me by." And despite himself, he could feel the beginnings of a smirk tug at his mouth, he had never been so at ease in his life. This was art. The dealing of scars. How had he not seen it before?

He flipped a coin to the man and it was caught deftly, how _sly_ – and if he felt the blood drip thick around the copper of the coin then he made no comment.

At age fourteen, Akasuna no Sasori became an artist.

* * *

Akatsuki started out with the likes of Orochimaru, Zetsu, Konan, Pein and Kakuzu – Sasori was the newest addition, and not the last. But in those starting days, those meager beginnings to what would eventually be an international reign of highly acclaimed terror Sasori was still with his senses.

Meaning, he was still partly human, _of the flesh._

Not to say that anyone had ever seen his face, or the crimson of his hair – he had taken to cocooning himself inside one of his first human puppets before he entered the base. Convinced to hide himself from the world until he'd be perfect enough to awe it again.

His still human body could not take the strain of being cooped up inside the bent backed puppet for too long, and so he would cast the armour aside when he was within his private quarters. Akatsuki catered to every one of its employees needs in exchange for their excellent services, Orochimaru had his lab, his pets and a batch of human…experiments Akatsuki was willing to provide. Kakuzu walked with his pockets full and Zetsu, well, Sasori didn't know what Zetsu could possibly want, but should the plant nin ask whatever was within reason and within budget would not be denied.

So Sasori had the privacy he needed. Took his meals in his room, had the droll opportunity to team up with Orochimaru on every two man mission and was left largely alone outside of working hours.

The process was excruciating, no amount of chakra, or craftsmanship could overcome the delicious violently blaring essence of pain as it ate him whole. Flesh stripped away from bones like bark from tree, stringy tough and red as a butcher's slice – he clenched the hilt of a kunai between his grinding teeth to stop the scream of humanity that would have ripped from his throat otherwise, and to keep from biting off his own tongue. But his hand had been steady, unforgiving when he split the skin from his elbow to his wrist to make the first of many experimental adjustments.

And then he'd lay on the woodwork, panes of finely polished grain, rods on the inside, bolts and screws, joints made from pre-made ligaments of his own handiwork – he tossed the old skin into the fire, and the burn of flesh and blood spiralled out the airvents like a black rot.

He got rid of every nerve ending, every inch of feeling replaced with hard unforgiving woodwork. His digestive organs had been a tricky ordeal, but he was a master of poisons, he had studied texts on the human body, of its likeness – and he soon disposed of such mortal functions as eating and sweating, sleeping, breeding with the flic of a scalpel knife and the aid of forbidden ninjutsu of his own creation.

He kept his heart, for chakra circulation, a center out of necessity alone.

The process was worthwhile, after all the pain he could now feel none at all. Nothing.

He was indestructible, he was forever. He was art.

And if now a days, once in a while a prostitute goes missing in Ame and surfaces a weeping, incoherent mess months later with her back etched with scars detailing a bloody butterfly or wolves and samurai – then, that will be something on the side too. Because Sasorie was a master of precision, and women's tears did not touch him enough to stop it.

The brat who replace Orichimaru had once told him he had too little imagination, why else would he play with dolls? It was morbid, and gruesome and just plain…weird. Why would you _do_ that?

Kisame's had only retorted that once, with a raucous chuckle full of teeth, that perhaps he had _too_ _much._

Itachi had simply watched him for a heartbeat, with the same disinterested calculation he did anything and slinked back into the shadows of his own motives. That Uchiha always had too much on his mind, and he thought, he was always thinking, had as many secrets as any ninja with his sleights of hand

No one was allowed in Sasori's room – and the leader ave him that much at least, shinobi understood that shinobi had their secrtets – Kakuzu told Deidara to learn how to sew his own damn arm back on the next time he tried getting past the redhead, he already had that moron masochist of a partner to take up his time, he didn't need more heavy duty emasculation and dismemberment to fix.

But the brat was a good sport when he wasn't trying to argue about what constituted as art, and he grinned and tried again and again, just to play around – oh, he was curious of what was inside those walls, and he _thought_ he knew, but it became more of a game than a goal, this trying to get into the thick of what Sasori was doing.

"Hey, danna." Deidara's eyes were far too interested then, though he was molding and tearing apart clay in his hands with motions that seemed almost bored. "What do you look like under that?"

"…brat." He said, a warning. It was raining something crazy, and though he could be spared the worst of the wet inside the hollow of wood, and his skin had long ago lost sensation when he'd taken a scalpel to himself, it was still a damper, it was still an irritant.

"Come on, I can guess." He pouted and yelled over the rush of water, his hat was a cover and the rain pounding on it was quite the noise. "You're older than me, right, danna?"

"You're a child."

He waved the jab offhandedly. "Jeez, apparently you're ancient. I bet you look like a crabby old geezer, so damn ugly you _have_ to hide yourself." He drawled, tearing apart the clay and putting it back together again. "Nothing to be ashamed of, danna – I accept you, I mean, Kakuzu aint a looker either, but he has the guts to stand up to people and say 'take me as I am, and if not, fuck you!' – you know, yeah?"

Sasori would have rolled his eyes if he could, the young were so obnoxiously dense.

"How do you even lay a girl, all cooped up in there? Doesn't your back crack? It's a big space, but maybe you're a small guy, anyway, it can't be good for your spine – is it that you're horribly scarred? How're you ever gonna score ladies if you hide away like that?"

"Do you ever shut up?"

"Avoiding the question?" Deidara tittered disapprovingly. "Look man, yeah. You call yourself an artist, a true artist would realize how to take advantage of his gifts- maybe your type of craft aint exactly endearing, scratch that, it can't ever be – it's fucked up as all hell…but anyone who can hold a paintbrush would realize that artistry means being a total chick magnet, yeah. But you won't even take advantage of that, yeah!"

Sasori would have sighed if he could, he kept silent hoping that the idiot would burn himself out on his own.

"You _are_ a guy right, right Sasori? I haven't ever seen you, so –"

"Brat, you are a fourteen year old with the braincells of a goldfish, do not assume that I would want nor take advice from you."

"Hey! I've been around!"

"…"

"So…" After a moment, Deidara said at length, with a legendary lack of tact. "You are a guy, right?"

Kakuzu would have to sew back that hand. Again.

* * *

His life ends at the hands of two kunoichi. Two. Specifically, his grandmother Chiyo - the old hack that just wouldn't die - and Haruno Sakura, the most interesting girl in the world.

Carnation hair and eyes the color of sap, a delicate mouth and skin so lovely it reminds him of his days in the the Kazekage's court. Lovely, like a spring fairy with that hair of hers, she would have made the loveliest doll.

He's got a knife gut deep in her, and she's got the power of oratory even as the poison kills her nice and slow. _Says_ things to him.

Sasori almost feels the beginnings of sentiment, but it's too late for any of that silliness, really.

Chiyo's puppets stab him raw through the heart - Father and Mother stiffly embracing him. He could have cracked a smile, or a snarl, if he could have.

Her eyes are green as valleyfire, and Sasori falls deep into death. Then deeper still.

* * *

They pulled him out of the grave with an unwelcome jerk, strings snapping taught, springing him upright. Coffin propped, the cold chill of life ebbing through veins long dead. _Edo Tensei_, words pulled out of a scroll, tomes of information he'd devoured over years, centuries it felt, sparking up life again like bright little bulbs.

And then, the foreign feeling of chilled fingers tangled in his chakra. He'd been puppeteer enough times to recognize that he'd been tugged up by someone else, someone more nefarious. The irony would have been sweet, except that those so used to controlling, Sasori had never appreciated being controlled.

A door slid open, cracks of light filtered in, pierced him full in the face. He hissed, voicebox trembling, skin thrumming with blood and muscle, nerves clenching behind the lens of his eyes, pupils contracting, fingers – hands clutching over his eyes.

Flesh, bone, _blood._

Air he did not need gurgled up the stale chambers of his lungs, earthy, alive.

The coffin crumbled around him, a battlefield replaced it. His mute little box of nothing crashed by the noise of war and bloodshed, the silk of his cloak rubbed over his skin soft as a whisper, but more certain than a sentence. He peeled back his fingers, peered at his summoner and face, no longer stiff and artificial, now curled into a sneer. _Of course._

Tobi, cloaked in darkness, the pinhole of his mask redder than murder.

Of course, it's be him. The pretender, the true orchestrator of it all.

Sasori was not at all alone, ranks of his colleagues stood in file, Akatsuki's mercenaries. Perfect dead soldiers of death. More obedient than they'd ever been in life.

Tobi propped his fists on his hips, chest puffed, inanely adopting an ordering tone. "There's war about, men. Look alive."

And then he threw his head back and laughed like it was the most hilarious thing in the world.

* * *

**total word count:** 3,909  
**chapter one word count:** 3,909


	2. Chapter 2

**entitled:** bang bang bang  
**fandom:** naruto, sasosaku  
**setting:** current shinobi war does not continue on the battlefield, but stretched years off it. a cold war continues, the akatsuki have been resurrected to carry on their side of things. undermining the elemental nations, running an intricate web of informants and hunting down shinobi in a bleak age where no one trusts no one.  
**warnings:** sex, and violence.  
**disclaimer:** i own nothing that isn't already mine  
**notes:** cannon, but divergent in terms of recent events.  
**summary: **"Of course I'd find you," He says, watching her closely with those dark gunmetal eyes of his. "You did kill me, after all." — It starts again in a tea house, in the heart of a cold war. The dead don't stay dead. Sasori would know her face anywhere.

* * *

The war stretches, and like a rubber band it snaps. The chain of command takes losses, shinobi break ranks – Uchiha Madara and Uchiha Obito have successfully managed to cause more anarchy than any two shinobi should be able to, and the earth is left wracked raw, bleeding and spluttering. It's said that they were killed, but Akasuna no Sasori lays his palm flat against his chest and feels that stutter of life and knows that it takes more than that to kill an insane Uchiha, for the jutsu still holds. He doesn't know its specifics but he is half-certain that once the user of a jutsu is slain, the technique falls apart.

Yet, Sasori is still here. The tailed beasts are once more roaming the lands, whether it is the wheat-haired jinchuuriki's doing or anothers, Sasori does not know, but the brat had proved himself troublesome before and it would be beneficial to their operation if he remained missing or dead.

The shinobi nations are in dark times, and the Akatsuki are as hated as they were when they were alive, had they not partaken in the war? Willingly or not? Sasori is somewhat grateful for their mistrust, because he does not think it is possible for him to return to Suna, there is nothing left for him there, is there? He's alive, he's immortal, and like the rest of the Akatsuki they keep busy.

So back to being mercenaries, earning information, Sasori's network of spies collapsed shortly after his death and assembling them back together had been trying, considering that most of them fell to the war and others are being baited by several shinobi nations.

The Uzumaki has been missing (a word that carefully substitutes for 'dead') for the past three years, and in his absence shinobi have yet to trust eachother. They are as at eachother's throats as they have ever been. The Akatsuki has known war, it is all they have ever known – snarling and killing, that was what they had been made for. In this cold after-war they have business opportunities, assassinations, thefts, all this – they are hated, but they are needed and paid well.

No one has ever seen Kakuzu this happy in years.

They broke back into twos as they all had, not even in this lifetime could Sasori have escaped being tied to Deidara.

"Sasori-danna?" Deidara had given him a look of bewilderment when they rose from the dead, studying his face. "Well, you're as hideous as I imagined."

Sasori re-invents his art, now that he has the perfect vessel, the perfect body there is no need to strip his flesh to the bone and replace his insides with saw dust, there is no fun in scarring prostitutes, he's above that now, isn't he? He's immortal. There is no vendetta to occupy him, and no reason for him to go out of his way. He's reached the highest point he ever hoped to reach, the final threshold, he's there. What is skin to him? What are the deep etches of scars, in this body? He feels with every fibre of him, the wetness of water, the fire in his fingertips, connected in ways they have not been in years. Deidara slit hit throat in a sparr, and the flesh had wept bloody red for an hour before it knitted itself back together, he'd gurgled iron in his mouth and bore his teeth in anger that filled his every vein. Deidara had laughed and laughed, and Sasori had knocked his teeth out, forgoing his puppets for his own fist, the skin of his knuckles stinging.

And then one days, In the slow drag of things between jobs and countries the two Akatsuki take a break. Somewhere in Water Country, in the heart of the monsoon, with the fog clinging to their cloaks, they step into a teahouse.

Deidara follows his eyes to the shamisen player, and grins.

* * *

When he'd seen her, he hadn't known what to think, didn't know what else to do but to keep watching her. The tea house manager had come forth to pour their drinks and ask how they were enjoying themselves as any hostess should and if anything had caught their eye. She was a lithe tall woman with a powdered homely face and a pale blue kimono – this was not a whorehouse, evidently, but something likened to a geisha parlour. For wit and art and comfort, and should a shinobi be able to like one of her girls…and her girls were equally taken with the shinobi...well, it would not be unheard of for one to be led to their beds. An establishment no doubt of the classiest ladies. Another time Sasori might have rolled his eyes.

"Your player is very good," Deidara complimented softly, and smiled when she bowed her thanks…his silver tongue was unexpected, but it seemed that even the bomb expert knew how to extract information when it was needed. "and very young."

"Sakura-san," she smiled lowly, proud. And Sasori frowned, most kunoichi changed their names during reconnaissance missions. "is seventeen years of age, she has been with us for a year and a half and picked up the skill quickly."

"Sakura-san?" Deidara said, but his eyes flashed, just as irked as his partner.

"A fitting name, isn't it?"

"Quite." Drawled the red head, his mouth thinned ever so slightly, impatient to the last. Deidara glared at him covertly for being rude, except Deidara was in no place to speak, intertwining his twitching fingers, as if he himself was overcome with the strangest urge to pull out some clay.

All shinobi have heard of reconnaissance missions that extend for long periods of time, sometimes three to five years in desperate cases – sleeper-cells, long-term spies, but still, in this teahouse between the middle of nowhere of Rain and Grass…it seemed a bit of a stretch to keep her here. And she had used her real name, had not applied any disguise or gengitsu, nor stayed to mingle with the guests of the house…

"Intriguing." Deidara admitted once the okami had retreated, "What would Konoha want here?"

"I haven't a clue."

"What're you gonna do, danna?"

He pushed away his sake and placed his palm flat against the grain of the table. "Nothing."

Deidara rose, and signaled to one of the girls to fill his sake cup. "Don't murder her, danna, it was a fair fight, after all. Maybe there'll be a lovely ransom for a lovely girl, yeah?" He looked back at the Suna-nin with a sly, knowing smirk. "If you need me, _whistle_."

* * *

He caught Sakura in his grasp where she stung against his palm like a handful of bees. Furious and beating against him with her fists, solidly connecting against the bones of his chest in a way that thudded his ribs against each other, bruised like skin, like human skin – reminded him the sensation of having skin once more, blood, flesh in all its entirety. He could smell her, when she was staring him down in one of her moods, or rather tilting her chin and looking up attempting to stare him down from the height he stood at, and he could smell her – the scent of soap, and sweat, and something too sweet.

It was unnerving.

The long kimono hindered her movements, and the tap to his throat had disabled her of her chakra, but Sakura saw his face and her own bled white before morphing into a snarl and lunging at him. He'd gotten the drop on her and he'd poisoned her before, he was pleased that she hadn't forgotten.

Sasori at once caught one of her fists in his hands, the bones behind within his palm snapped like twigs and he'd hissed, felt the contours of every small knuckle, the scars on her skin like tiny slips of silver light. He hadn't, after all, felt pain in a while.

Her skin was warm too, and she hadn't known either that he was flesh and bone, she must have heard the snap of his bones because her eyes widened green and outraged when they caught his wince. The Sasori she'd known didn't have the ability to flinch, nonetheless any way of facial expression at all, and wood didn't feel that smooth, smooth as skin.

But he'd caught that fist and held on, it was for a heartbeat before his other hand flashed and Sakura felt the needle of the vial in his hand sink into her wrist before she could stop it.

He caught her mid-fall, a tangle of limbs and kimono and girlflesh.

* * *

**total word count:** 5,316  
**chapter two word count:** 1,407


End file.
